Mmm doing work for the military has immediately given me inspiration for my next article. (hint: title) My favourite being "I'm looking for an honest man." (Diogenes) On the other hand, I think that we make mischievous discoveries in physics, especially in quantum mechanics (e.g. uncertainty principle, the cat...), although some of these are improperly applied. :3
"Nothing to do"
Well, Calvin (Lee... not Han Yen Kwang as most people mistakenly think) mentioned that I should value my free time and learn some math/physics while I'm in the camp.
Having taken a nice tea break I decided to skip lunch and spend that hour doing some old math in my office. I've been exploiting proof of contradiction quite regularly in advanced calculus. I find it uncommonly used for the math olympiad: usually the technique is to use some clever algebra and apply a few 'known' inequalities (AM-GM-HM, C-S, Jensen's, Schur's...) So I thought I should go back and try spamming it on the math olympiad questions (particularly the inequality ones). More conveniently, I couldn't bring a whole book with me, so it would be easier to just bring some paper and a page of questions, and the math olympiad questions were the only ones I had listed on paper.
"What are you doing?"
"Maths."
*A few collective 'What the?'s from everyone in the office*
"Since you have nothing to do, I've got something for you..."
So... doing maths = having nothing to do? I skipped my lunch break for it please?
P.S.: I know some people are really picky about the 's' in 'Maths' and I actually understand now. 'Company' is abbreviated as 'COY' in the army - I had some difficulty figuring that out.
Well, Calvin (Lee... not Han Yen Kwang as most people mistakenly think) mentioned that I should value my free time and learn some math/physics while I'm in the camp.
Having taken a nice tea break I decided to skip lunch and spend that hour doing some old math in my office. I've been exploiting proof of contradiction quite regularly in advanced calculus. I find it uncommonly used for the math olympiad: usually the technique is to use some clever algebra and apply a few 'known' inequalities (AM-GM-HM, C-S, Jensen's, Schur's...) So I thought I should go back and try spamming it on the math olympiad questions (particularly the inequality ones). More conveniently, I couldn't bring a whole book with me, so it would be easier to just bring some paper and a page of questions, and the math olympiad questions were the only ones I had listed on paper.
"What are you doing?"
"Maths."
*A few collective 'What the?'s from everyone in the office*
"Since you have nothing to do, I've got something for you..."
So... doing maths = having nothing to do? I skipped my lunch break for it please?
P.S.: I know some people are really picky about the 's' in 'Maths' and I actually understand now. 'Company' is abbreviated as 'COY' in the army - I had some difficulty figuring that out.
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